


Awoken From the Abyss

by TheAzureFox



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS
Genre: Gen, Spoilers for Season 2, also technical headcanons for both the start and end of the Hanoi Tower arc, watch this theory quickly go up in flames
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 01:35:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14009322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAzureFox/pseuds/TheAzureFox
Summary: Ema Bessho awakens to a familiar face.(theory fic. Spoilers for season 2 characters)





	Awoken From the Abyss

**Author's Note:**

> I know it's 11:30 pm here now and i should be sleeping so I can study for finals tomorrow but fuck it let me put down this crack theory before VRAINS shreds it to pieces (also I totes want to be the first one to write for Takeru/Soulburner so there's that too).

Ema Bessho awakes from an abyss of nightmares.

She doesn’t remember much. Her mind is fatigued, worn down by the darkness of the unconscious. Still, there are bits and pieces that slip through the cracks. _Akira. Link VRAINS. Playmaker._

_Revolver._

Her eyes stretch open, her heart thundering at such disgraced memories. She’d taken on Hanoi’s leader, flaunting her talent moments before her pride had been stolen from her. She’d been slammed against a wall, crumpling to the ground only to crane her eyes to meet Playmaker’s own in what she thought to be the last moments of her life.

“Take my treasure,” she whispers, a lone firefly escaping her grasp, "and run."

 _Let the world be saved by my own actions alone,_ she left unsaid, a selfish notion brought about by a selfish treasure-hunter. In that moment, on her final hour Ema put herself upon the pedestal of a "hero". If she could not live with her riches in her hand, then she would gladly die a martyr for humanity's salvation.

“Thank you,” Playmaker says as he holds his arm out and snares her bug whole, “Ghost Girl.”

 _I’ll save Link VRAINS with your treasure_ , he promises over her dying body, anguish twisting his face into disbelief.

And, though the words reach her ears, she doubts their reality. Entrusting Playmaker with her treasure had been a fatal gamble with no guaranteed results. She’d made her choice to give him the data out of desperation, a final blow to her pride as she came to value her life over her own selfish greed. If she had had any other option, if she had had any other _choice_ , perhaps she would’ve took another path. Trusting in a stranger, much less one who had yet to earn her total faith, had not been easy. But, when it came down to it, she would much rather die with her name in the history books than with her treasure in her hands. She had the pride of her legend to carry on and no folly of hers was to take that away.

 _Let’s play a bet,_ she leaves unsaid to the boy who watches her disappear.

 _My treasure for your life and mine_ , she says as her arms drops to her side.

A ghost of a smile as she issues one last verbal warning. 

_Spend it wisely._

Afterwards, when she disappears from that realm, comes the darkness. Ema knows little of what the darkness is or what it means, all she knows is that she has fallen prey to the "Anothers" curse she has heard so much about. She awakes in a realm of purple miasma, her mind a haze as she screams and thrashes, a conscious body of incoherent thoughts as she struggles through the world of the abyss. Such agony, such  _torture_ lingered within a world yet undefined, a place of simultaneous existence and yet nonexistence as Ema wandered through it.  _Who am I?_ She thinks, banging her hands on invisible walls.  _Where am I?_ She thinks as she scratches her nails through purple fog.  _Why have I been forsaken?_

She’d heard of what it meant to become an “Another”, to have your soul sucked into the death of another realm, but, oh, did she not know she would _feel_ it. That crawling abyss of purple miasma, the shouting cries of her own voice, hoarse and rasping with the crossing of time, how did she not know such _agony?_  How did she not _fathom_ the _pain_ of the Anothers, not see little Aoi Zaizen scream in this agonizing realm that suffocated her whole? How long she did she stay there, in that wretched world? How long did she wander, did she cry, did she suffocate until her mind failed to follow? Ema did not know, did not _want_ to know.

And, yet, in the end, here she sat, finally awoken from that never-ending nightmare as if it had never existed in the first place.

It felt like forever. It felt like days, months, _years_ since she’d last awakened to a world not yet crawling in foul purple. Her body felt sore, exhausted, stressed and to the brink of its limits. She could not lift a finger, could not do much but breathe into a mask that covers dry lips.

Wait.

A mask?

Ema Bessho blinks and it as if her conscious has fully returned to her body within a second's glance. The tiles upon which her gaze strains are not that of what she lasts remembers. When she had escaped to VRAINS, she had done so in the comfort of her secret warehouse, not in the white room of a hospital that she fears she’s found herself in. White curtains drape to either side of her vision, her magenta eyes barely to scope out their presence. There is noise, but it is scraping and alarming, too distant and too vague for her to make coherency of.

 _Shit,_ she thinks,  _how long have I been out?_

Her heart hammers in her chest, the peculiarity of her situation rather alarming. How did she get here? Who found her, who brought her here? No one even knew where she-

 _Akira_ , a soft voice warns her quietly, a mere whisper that goes against the rational thinking of her brain. _Akira brought you here_.

The suggestion soothes her greatly. Right, of course. Akira knew the location of her warehouse. If he’d grown worried about her, if he hadn’t heard from her, he would have sought her immediately. He was kind in that respect, a troublesome individual who tended to the well-being of others. It would only make sense that he’d have brought her here.

A clock. Ticking. Gradually, sound filters into Ema’s ears, agonized distortion paving way to familiar noises. In the distance, voices talking. What are they saying? What are they murmuring about in such awfully clipped notes? Ema doesn’t know, not sure she wants to know. There’s a soft beat beside her, a _beep-beep-beep_ that is uncomfortable to hear. She knows that noise, the noise of a machine meant to tell if she is dead or alive.

_A heart monitor._

She wants to laugh.

_It's that bad, huh?_

Ema closes her eyes and tries not to feel the way she feels completely out of control.

A bit frustrated by the view she has been given, she tries to move her arms, to move her legs or her head or _anything_ that would grant her better vision. However, what little control she has results in little fluttering movements of her eyes. She can see lights, can see the ceiling and that of the curtains on either side of her, but she cannot see much else. It aggravates her, honestly. Her curiosity is burning with an insatiable appetite and yet she has to stifle in order to keep her sanity as her body fails to respond. _What lies beyond this ceiling?_ She muses in irritation. _What lies beyond these curtains and that heart monitor and whatever else that lies beyond my reach?_

She does not have time for patient answers. Because, before she can react, a curtain to her left pulls back. It retracts alongside an excitable sound which filters its way her ears, a humming tune yet to be configured into proper words and units. Her heart picks up again at such a noise, not because it stresses her to hear but because  _oh god she recognizes that voice._

It takes little time but, after a few seconds, a white-and-red-haired boy comes to lean over her, his red eyes wide as an area just next to her shoulder depresses under his weight.

“Are you awake?” He asks with careful worry. “You were asleep for a long time.”

Ema's breath is stolen from her for just a second, succumbing to her surprise as she opens her mouth to rasp her first words in an eternity’s life-time:

“Homura...Takeru.”

The boy gives a soft smile, shrugging his shoulders with a sigh as he says, almost shyly: “Hey there, Oba-san.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have had the theory that Ema is the "auntie" of one of the lost children for a long time and that said lost child is either: in a coma, very sickly, or out of town until a later part of the show. And, now that we have what looks to be one of the final lost babies coming into the show, I can't help but revive that theory for myself before canon wrecks it to pieces. 
> 
> That, and I have an odd feeling that, since Ema's the only one who we didn't get to see go into Link VRAINS into this show, she'll also be one of the ones that will "wake up" to "different conditions" than that of which she went in with (tho granted perhaps not in a hospital bed like this fanfic assumes). 
> 
> Looking into the symptoms of a coma and knowing that Ema has been comatose for nearly 6 or so hours already...unless having your consciousness cut from the VRAINS means you're not really comatose but " _comatose_ " then uh...I truly worry for her. Because apparently being in a coma is a medical emergency (wherein it's dangerous to the brain and one's own life) and if Ema's been in that state for six hours without any help (not to mention _Akira_ and _Aoi_ although _they_ at least have Hayami and their cleaning robot to call the hospital for them)...yowch, pooe Ema, quite honestly. 
> 
> I fear for Ema like, a lot, and if she doesn't have anyone other than Akira to get her to a hospital (and assuming VRAINS is following coma logic) then it's possible Homura can be the one who took her to hospital instead. It'd add to Ema's BG story and if we're jumping into the SOL arc then unwittingly we'll be seeing more of Ema bc with SOL comes Akira + Aoi and with those two comes Ema so if Homura is included as one of SOL's members then it's likely that he might end up with a connection to Ema too.
> 
> Also, seeing as Akira and Shoichi have children under their care and both are relatively connected to Ema as a "trio" all of their own, it makes me wonder if Ema will follow in their footsteps and have a child all of her own to have a supporting relationship with (in this case, an "aunt" and "nephew").
> 
> That all said, I'm fully waiting for episode 46/47/whatever episode this arc ends/begins on to see if I end up right or wrong but until canon ~~inevitably~~ proves me otherwise, I'm gonna theorize this as the case for Homura's character.


End file.
